Melina Bernstein is a researcher and professor at the University of La Plata in Argentina, where she leads a research group that studies different types of supernovae (https://sos.fcaglp.unlp.edu.ar/).

Her research primarily focuses on numerical simulations of core-collapse supernovae, their connection to progenitor stars and the evolutionary processes that lead to these catastrophic events. She is also interested in the origins of peculiar transients and the modelling of supernovae at early times, including their potential pre-explosion activity.

Maria Teresa Botticella is a Senior Researcher at the INAF-Capodimonte Astronomical Observatory in Naples, Italy. Her research focuses on Time-Domain Astronomy, with particular emphasis on the discovery and characterization of astrophysical transients through multi-wavelength and multi-messenger observations, as well as statistical studies of their parent stellar populations. Her work spans supernovae and intermediate-luminosity transients, with a particular interest in their progenitors, the physical processes driving their diversity, and the environments in which they occur. She also searches for electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational-wave and high-energy neutrino sources. Maria Teresa is actively involved in several major international projects, including the Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST, Euclid, SOXS, CTA, Engrave, Einstein Telescope and KM3NeT.

Poonam Chandra is an Astrophysicist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), USA. Before moving to NRAO, she worked at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research as a Reader and an Associate Professor. Poonam is also a fellow of three major Indian academies, Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and the National Academy of Sciences.

Poonam's research focuses on understanding the lives and explosive deaths of massive stars through multiwavelength observations, particularly at radio and X-ray wavelengths. Her work investigates the interaction of supernovae with their circumstellar environments to uncover the mass-loss history and evolution of their progenitor stars. She has also made significant contributions to the study of gamma-ray bursts, neutron-star mergers, magnetic massive stars, and other transient astrophysical phenomena.

Géza Csörnyei is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany. His research focuses on measuring distances using Type II supernovae through radiative-transfer modeling of their spectral time series. He currently leads the analysis within the adH0cc (accurate determination of H₀ using core-collapse supernovae) collaboration, which aims to measure the Hubble constant to 2% precision independently of the cosmic distance ladder.

Tamara Davis is a professor at the University of Queensland whose research uses supernovae and large-scale structure to investigate the expansion history of the Universe and the nature of dark energy. She co-led the supernova working group in the Dark Energy Survey and is currently Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav). Davis is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, a Member of the Order of Australia, and has received numerous awards for her research and science communication.

Prof. Avishay Gal-Yam is the Weizmann Institute's Vice President for Development and Communications. He joined the Institute as a principal investigator in the Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics in 2007 and is the incumbent of the Arlyn Imberman Professorial Chair. Prof. Gal-Yam is a cosmic detective who works to identify the stars responsible for spectacular stellar explosions called supernovae. Solving these mysteries can provide vital clues for both the origins of the elements—including those necessary for life itself—and for cosmological questions about the origin and fate of the universe.

Saurabh W. Jha is a Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA. Jha's research focuses on studying exploding white dwarf stars called Type Ia supernovae, and using them as cosmological tools with which to survey the Universe. While in graduate school, Jha was a member of the High-z Supernova Search Team, one of two teams that in 1998 discovered that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. Since then Jha has led numerous observational research programs to both understand the nature of white dwarf supernova explosions and apply them to measure cosmological parameters, using data from ground-based telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the James Webb Space Telescope.

Evan O'Connor is an Associate Professor in the Department of Astronomy and the Oskar Klein Centre at Stockholm University. Their research focus is on understanding the impact of neutrino and nuclear physics, as well as progenitor structure, on the core-collapse supernova central engines, especially as they relate to extreme core collapse events linked to black hole formation or magnetar and collapsar formation. Multi messenger predictions from such events are also a keen interest of their work.

Danny Milisavljevic is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University. He received his B.Art.Sc. from McMaster University, his MSc in the Philosophy and History of Science from the London School of Economics, and his PhD in Physics and Astronomy from Dartmouth College. He subsequently held postdoctoral positions at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. His research investigates the physics of stellar explosions, with a focus on the progenitor systems and long-term evolution of core-collapse supernovae.

A central theme of his work is bridging the communities studying supernovae and supernova remnants, connecting explosion physics to the structures observed centuries later through young and nearby remnants like Cassiopeia A and more distant objects like SN 1987A that are transitioning from supernova to remnant in real time. His recent work with the James Webb Space Telescope has opened a new window onto the dust, molecules, and fine-scale ejecta of these systems.

Anais Möller is a Senior Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. Trained in Venezuela and France, she has built her career at the crossroads of observational supernova cosmology, time-domain astronomy, and machine learning. She has done postdoctoral fellowships in Australia at ANU with Brian Schmidt's group and Swinburne, as well as CNRS in France.

She is the Principal Investigator of Fink, an open-source astronomical broker that now processes live data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, connecting over 130 researchers and engineers across 28 countries in the pursuit of the universe's most explosive and mysterious events.

Bernhard Mueller (Monash University) is a computational astrophysicist. Ever since his PhD (TU Munich, 2009), he has worked on simulations of stellar explosions and their associated multi-messenger signals. He is also interested in the hydrodynamics of stellar interiors and compact object populations. Since he joined Monash University in 2014, Bernhard Mueller has held a DECRA and a Future Fellowship.

Adam G. Riess is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and Thomas J. Barber Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University and a Distinguished Astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. He was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt, for the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. His research focuses on observational cosmology, including precise measurements of the Hubble constant, dark energy, supernovae, Cepheid variables, and the cosmic distance scale. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and has received numerous awards for his contributions to astrophysics.

TBC

Benjamin Shappee is an Associate Professor at the University of Hawai'i Institute for Astronomy. His research focuses broadly on time-domain astronomy, with particular interests in Type Ia supernova progenitors and explosions, Type Ia supernova cosmology—including measurements of local cosmic flows—and the discovery of new classes of transients. He is a founding member of the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), PI of the Spectroscopic Classification of Astronomical Transients survey using SNIFS on the University of Hawaiʻi 2.2-meter telescope, and co-PI of the Hawaiʻi Supernova Flows survey. He is also co-leading the development of Ānuenue, a next-generation, geographically distributed survey built from arrays of small telescopes deployed at multiple sites to provide high-cadence, wide-field monitoring of the bright transient sky.

Ken received his Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara, was a postdoc and an Einstein Fellow at UC Berkeley, and was a staff researcher at UC Berkeley from 2014 - 2026. His research focuses on a theoretical understanding of thermonuclear supernovae, from progenitor modeling to explosion simulations and radiation transport calculations. He recently became a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he studies inertial confinement fusion.

Lister Staveley-Smith is a Professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Western Australia, where he studies galaxies, cosmology and supernova remnants. His interest in SNRs stems from his involvement in the observation, with the newly commissioned Australia Telescope Compact Array, of late-stage synchrotron emission from the SN1987A shock front as it collided with the circumstellar ring on about day 1200.

He and collaborators still monitor and image its radio emission, at frequencies from 0.1 to 300 GHz, every few years as continues to grow in size. He is PI of the WALLABY extragalactic HI survey on the ASKAP telescope and formerly served together with Brian Schmidt on the AAL Board and the CAASTRO executive team.

Sherry Suyu is measuring the expansion rate of our Universe, probing the nature of dark energy, studying the formation/evolution of galaxies and their dark matter halos, and observing supernovae through gravitational lensing. She has led the H0LiCOW program (www.h0licow.org) that measured the distances to six gravitational lenses, establishing strong lensing as one of the best cosmological probes. She is also leading the HOLISMOKES program (www.holismokes.org) to study cosmology and supernova progenitors with lensed supernovae. [photo credit: Astrid Eckert / TUM]

John Tonry has spent much of his career chasing cosmological parameters, from a thesis on Virgo infall and the apparent change of clustering scale of dark relative to visible matter, to SBF for the Hubble constant and helping stabilize the Phillips relation, to the thesis committee for this guy named Schmidt who liked core collapse supernovae, to the High-Z collaboration and establishing the consistency of the expansion of the universe with a cosmological constant, to the long road of firming up the distant end with ground-based surveys and HST photometry and building Pan-STARRS for high precision photometry of nearby supernovae.  Most recently construction of a facility to find dangerous asteroids helps to reduce selection biases for supernovae of different types in different environments.

TBC

Azalee is an astrophysicist whose research focuses on the massive stars that evolve into Type II supernovae. She completed her PhD at the University of California, Davis and is currently an LSSTC Catalyst Fellow at the University of Arizona. Her expertise spans massive star evolution, astronomical spectroscopy, and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) instrumentation. During five years at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), she coordinated calibration pipeline development for the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), monitored ultraviolet detector performance, and conducted spectroscopic studies of massive stars, including those in R136. Azalee is also an active contributor to the astronomy community through The Carpentries, where she teaches programming and reproducible research practices and develops astronomy-focused data science training for researchers.